Phase 1 of this quest began in 2003 when Apple first launched the iTunes Music Store. At launch, the store only had some 200,000 pieces of music to download, so it hardly threatened the booming music CD sales of the time. But that quickly changed, and now iTunes is the biggest music retailer, with downloads far outpacing CD sales.

Phase 2 began 5 years later, in 2008. It was at that time that Apple unveiled the first MacBook Air — a super-lightweight notebook with no built-in optical drive. Initially, people were wowed by the machine, but that quickly dried up as performance issues kept traditional MacBooks on top. But the newly revamped MacBook Air, launched late last year, fixes those performance issues. And with it, Apple has also included a way to let people install software (such as re-installing OS X) by USB drive, further eliminating the need for an optical drive — something which I haven’t used on any machine in months.

And that brings us to Phase 3, the Mac App Store. As Apple has already made clear on their preview page, they intend to use the store to distribute their own key software, such as the iLife and iWork suite of apps. And all of these apps will be able to be purchased individually (for $14.99 if the screenshots are correct) instead of as a full (and fully-priced) bundle. It’s hard to imagine why anyone would buy the apps on disc rather than simply download them via the Mac App Store anymore. Again, death of the disc.

Instead, so far, it seems mainly as if iOS app store developers are working on simple, cheap software for the new Mac-based store. And I’ve argued before that the Mac App Store may lead to a whole new class of “micro-apps” for the desktop. But if enough of these apps become popular enough — in particular, it seems like games have a shot — it will be hard for the more traditional software makers to avoid the Mac App Store. The wide-reaching distribution model may end up being too enticing.

And if that happens, the CD and the DVD will be goners, at least in terms of software distribution on the Mac platform. It’s not a coincidence that Apple has a MacBook Air on the landing page for the Mac App Store. You can almost hear Apple, as Rooster Cogburn from True Grit, looking at the compact disc and saying, “I mean to kill you!”

In a plutonomy there is no such animal as “the U.S. consumer” or “the UK consumer”, or indeed the “Russian consumer”. There are rich consumers, few in number, but disproportionate in the gigantic slice of income and consumption they take. There are the rest, the “non-rich”, the multitudinous many, but only accounting for surprisingly small bites of the national pie.

What is more relevant to our times, though, is that the rich of today are also different from the rich of yesterday. Our light-speed, globally connected economy has led to the rise of a new super-elite that consists, to a notable degree, of first- and second-generation wealth. Its members are hardworking, highly educated, jet-setting meritocrats who feel they are the deserving winners of a tough, worldwide economic competition—and many of them, as a result, have an ambivalent attitude toward those of us who didn’t succeed so spectacularly. Perhaps most noteworthy, they are becoming a transglobal community of peers who have more in common with one another than with their countrymen back home. Whether they maintain primary residences in New York or Hong Kong, Moscow or Mumbai, today’s super-rich are increasingly a nation unto themselves.

Color me excited as well! It feels like the era of Jetsons. Now we just need flying cars to go mainstream.

A quote from Steve Jobs comes to mind. “I think PCs are going to be like trucks. And this is going to make some people uneasy.”

This competition between Apple & Google will bring forward an environment that is bring about a lot of opportunities.

Agree 100% — ubiquitous tablets will cause some really interesting changes in society. It’s illuminating watching a novice user use an iPad; I’ve seen both young kids and senior citizens become proficient with it in an amazingly short amount of time. You can take pry my terminals and Emacs windows away from my cold dead fingers, but for 90%+ of the population, something like an iPad / Android tablet (with perhaps an optional keyboard for writing) is really just about perfect.

One can’t really tell from a promotional video, but the main thing that stands out to me is the improved home screen over iPad. It’s too “technical” to be mass market in this version; viz. “Books \n 3×3” type stuff – my parents won’t know what 3×3 means, even after explanation. Even I’m only guessing is the size the widget takes on the home screen. However, assuming they fix that, it’s rather an improvement on Apple’s iOS SpringBoard, which is looking rather dated (alongside their notification system). Here’s to competition accelerating an upgrade in iOS 5!

The rest of the applications, one can’t really tell in short clip. A lot of them – mail, video chat etc – seem very similar to what one would find elsewhere, except with the Honeycomb chrome (take it or leave it, as personal preference dictates). In others, I worry they’ve gone for eye candy over usability. For example, in “Books”, the circular scroll is all very well, but I can’t see any way of telling how far through your collection you are, nor where the book you want might be. Of course, the is prerelease promo, so it might be obvious in the real thing. What most people don’t seem to get is that Apple tend to use eye candy only when it’s useful – not just to look like something in Minority Report. Even they don’t get it right all the time (I’m looking at you, Time Machine animation!). Eye candy is really cool for promotional videos, but when you’re trying to use the application for the 4562nd time you really hope that it’s added just to enhance usability, rather than impress CES visitors.

More and more I’m forced to face the reality that ChromeOS is doomed.

Conceptually I still like the IDEA of ChromeOS more but I just can’t see a consumer choosing what is essentially a browser over something like this.

My only hope is that Google will try and move Android to a place where Web Apps are just as powerful as native apps on the platform.

Google isn’t a web application company—they’re an advertising company. That’s what they do best, and that’s what drives their company. Of Google’s $23.6 billion of revenue in 2009, all but $760 million of it was derived from advertising, and nearly 70 percent of it was from Google’s own websites

There’s another reason they don’t charge for their services, though. Since Google’s business is advertising, shifting industries away from paying business models is in their interest. If people are willing to pay for email, mapping and documents, Google’s business model is limited. Thus, using the outsized revenues they make from advertising on search, Google gives away Gmail, Maps, Docs, navigation, translation, et cetera, so no one can compete in those areas—to make free the norm for these services.

And if a business becomes dependent on advertising for revenue, that’s good for Google, because they’re better at it than everyone else.

Instead, Google’s strategy is to weaken other companies’ businesses (say, email) by offering something quite good or good enough for free, take over that market, and then use their new dominant position to rake in advertising revenue.

Phone makers could change the default search engine on their phones to something other than Google; mobile devices might change how people find information—they might switch away entirely from using a search engine, and in that case, Google would be dead in the water; or, worse, perhaps mobile devices could move people away from using advertising-supported web applications, and toward primarily using paid-for applications; in that case, Google would really be screwed.

Moreover, why would Google be so willing to empower network providers by giving them so much control over Android? Because it means wider adoption of Android, and as more Android-based devices flood the market, the hardware manufacturers themselves are increasingly irrelevant.

At that point, hardware will be commoditized, and building a mobile device business based on a different OS than Android will be incredibly difficult. Profit potential will shift from selling actual devices (where margins will be small) to providing services for those devices—quite convenient for Google, who’s in the business of making web services and providing advertising.

This would squeeze out space for Apple in the mass market, forcing them into the high-end of the market, where people are willing to pay higher prices for a better device and experience. This would still be a good business for Apple, but they wouldn’t significantly influence the mobile market’s direction.

Clicking “all” under featured shows me a handful of web apps. And once you click this option, there’s no way to get back to the Utilities category! The breadcrumbs aren’t linked and the left menu is also unlinked. So I need to go back to the main web store and start over again.

Alright so I found the CC app, let’s install it. Since the app is free, it’s just one click and the app is added to your “apps”. Now where is the app installed — how do I find it? Apparently the only place to find the apps you installed is to open a new tab. This means when you open the Chrome web browser, it will still default to the home page you have set. Yet again, another piece of poor usability. I doubt the average web user will understand how to find the apps after they are installed. If you compare to the iPhone or iPod Touch app store experience, you install an app and bingo it’s on your screen – easy to find and easy to load.

This is an issue with a lot of the consumer products Google launches – they are awesome with utility but not as strong with consumer usability. Google is going to have to dramatically increase the usability before the Chrome Web Store can appeal to the masses.

Tomorrow I will provide my suggestions on how Google can easily increase the usability and app discovery for their new Google Chrome web store. Grab the RSS feed to be instantly notified when the content is available.

Now, it’s possible that sales slowed a bit over the holidays, but the impact couldn’t have been that huge. There is, however, one more significant explanation for this: Google hasn’t done much to expose the Web Store to users. In fact, the current stable release of Chrome still doesn’t actually feature the Chrome Web Store anywhere — it only shows up if you go to the Web Store directly and install an application. That said, Google has placed banner ads for the Store on some sites (including TechCrunch), and the store got loads of publicity at launch, so it’s not like it’s a secret.

There are some free applications that are getting far more attention, like Quick Note, which has 8,000 installs this week. Obviously it’s common for free applications to get more installations than premium apps, but the discrepancy — 65 paid installs versus 8,000 free — seems pretty steep.

One thing is clear: Google has a long way to go with the Web Store. It’s still impossible to distinguish applications that are basically just bookmarks from those that are full-fledged web apps. And while the purchase flow itself is pretty simple (you can buy something in a couple clicks, assuming you already have a Google Checkout account), I think Google will have to put some work into educating people on what exactly they’re paying for.

I don’t think that’s a key objective, traditional computers already have many native apps installed on them, less incentive to shop for apps. and isn’t the aim the get people move away from traditional computers? Actually people do use the apps, the install no. for free apps aren’t bad.

We created two Chrome store apps. A FREE (horoscope) and PAID one (Tarot Reading). The free is obviously getting more installs with far less promotion. The paid is getting a ton of promotion but not converting. It’s a bummer because we had a blast building it and exploiting HTML5.

We consciously didn’t just replicate the site, we built a real stand alone HTML 5 showpiece. And we worked with several other cool developers who also worked hard to show case the HTML5 technology. But there are a ton of just web site and flash app ported over which are undermining the real promise of the store.

I think time will tell. For now, i encourage people to spend time browsing, there are some real gems in there.

I agree, way too many of the “apps” are just a container for a web site that already exists and can be reached via normal browsing. I commented on Twitter that Google should only be allowing true applications in the Chrome store, then someone who knows I don’t like Apple’s walled garden approach replied with a tweet suggesting now I like Apple’s approach. *sigh* Fair enough. But it really dilutes the store and makes it seem like a gimmick.

Most of the apps that are currently in the webstore are nothing short of a bookmark for a cluttered web page. Until web developers understand that people want a web application as opposed to a web page, there will not be an increase in downloads. There are plenty of gaps that still haven’t been filled for the CR-48, specifically. There still isn’t a good note-taking app that can sync documents online. Even the little things would be good for now.

Yeah, this is something that I’m having a hard time wrapping my mind around even while using the Cr-48. Because everything exists in the browser it feels like I’m paying to go to a certain site on the internet and, therefore, I think, “Well I’ll just get this some other place.” I know the actual dedicated web apps are different, but they don’t *feel* different, and that’s something that a closed (or disconnected) system naturally lends itself to.

When you have an empty device it’s natural to think, “I need to put stuff on this thing,” and so you go and get stuff to put on it. But when your device is the internet, everything is through the browser and it feels like another pay wall set up. I’m not saying feelings won’t change as the web store gains more apps and more recognition, but it’s definitely a hurdle that Google faces, I think.